I Built a Fake Market Detector Using DEX Trade Fees

Last month I almost aped into a Solana token showing $2M in daily volume. Everything looked legit active chart, thousands of transactions, growing holder count. Then I looked at the fees. The token had generated $12 in total platform fees on $2M of volume. That's a 0.0006% fee ratio. On a real market, that number should be somewhere between 0.5% and 2%. It was a wash traded token. The "volume" was bots trading back and forth with themselves. I would have lost everything. That's when I started building a market legitimacy scanner powered by fee data. Here's how it works and how you can build one too. Why Fees Can't Be Faked Every DEX trade has three cost components that most platforms hide from you: Component What it is Typical cost (Solana) Gas Fee Network cost to validators ~$0.35 Platform Fee Aggregator cut (Axiom, GMGN, etc.) ~1% of trade MEV Fee Priority tips, Jito bundles ~$2-5 Here's the key insight: on a $2,500 trade, the platform fee ($25) is 90% of your total cost but most int